AUSTRIA-HUNGARY AND THE ORIGINS OF WORLD WAR I
This research paper examines Austria-Hungary's degree of responsibility for the outbreak of World War I. Its thesis is that actions taken by Austria-Hungary to deal with Serbian nationalism in the decade preceding, and in the five weeks following, the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 set in motion a series of events which led to World War I. However, a number of other nations, Serbia, Germany and Russia, and, to a lesser extent, France and Great Britain, played important roles in causing that war. The origins of the war lay in the mistaken judgements of many key European statesmen and in the breakdown of the balance of power system in Europe during the decades immediately preceding 1914.
The Hapsburg Empire, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, was dissolved in 1918 as a direct result of the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I. Under Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, all damages and losses suffered by the victorious Allies were stated to be "a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies" (Fleming, 1968, p. 191). In fact, the central problem which triggered the initiation of hostilities among all the Great Powers of Europe for the first time in more than a century was an intractable dispute between Austria-Hungary and the kingdom of Serbia. Bismarck had predicted that the next major European war would be ignited by "some damn foolish thing in the Balkans" (Tuchman, 1962, p. 71). Since 1914, historians have disagreed as to the degree of complicity of the Serbian and Russian governments in the plot to assassinate the Austrian Archduke. His murder was committed by a Bosnian teenager, who was a member of terrorist group which had been recruited, trained and armed by the Serbian Black Hand Society, in which high ranking army officers and other officials of Serbia were deeply involved. Herr...